The foundation that runs Wikipedia has finally agreed to pay contributors to the online encyclopedia a modest fee for their work. But it won’t pay the thousands of people who participate in creating the wiki pages just artists who create “key illustrations” for the site.

Beginning next fall, freshmen placed in Next House during the summer will be able to participate in Residence Exploration and enter the Housing Readjustment Lottery. McCormick Hall was not included in the change.

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Dec. 4, 2007

Muhammad Yunus, winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, will deliver MIT’s 2008 Commencement address. Yunus won the Nobel Prize for developing microlending, a system that offers small amounts of credit to the poor in developing nations.

A new assessment by American intelligence agencies released Monday concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains frozen, contradicting a judgment two years ago that Tehran was working relentlessly toward building a nuclear bomb.

The British schoolteacher jailed in Sudan for allowing her 7-year-old pupils to name a class teddy bear Muhammad was pardoned Monday by the Sudanese president and left for England later in the evening.

Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, the two former prime ministers who have long bitterly opposed each other, joined with an opposition alliance on Monday to denounce what they saw as an unfair environment ahead of parliamentary elections planned for January.

A federal appeals panel ruled Monday that a state-financed evangelical Christian program to help prisoners re-enter civilian life fostered religious indoctrination and violated the constitutional separation of church and state.

Although Rudolph W. Giuliani is campaigning as President Bush’s staunch ally in the war on terror, his law office has lobbied Congress on behalf of legislation that the Bush administration calls a threat to anti-terrorism efforts in the Horn of Africa.

Gas mileage would go up under the compromise reached by congressional leaders last week, but not as high as the trumpeted numbers. And despite the tougher 35-mpg standard, a growing population of drivers would push up total fuel use, as well as greenhouse gas emissions — but not as rapidly as it would without the legislation.

After a bitterly cold weekend, conditions were primed for our first accumulating snowfall of the season. Although only a couple inches fell on campus early Monday morning, it was enough to change the landscape from fall’s dying colors to a layer of white.

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Dec. 4, 2007

We are grateful to David Sheets ’09 for conveying his thoughts on the Undergraduate Association (“UA Needs Transparency,” Nov. 30, 2007). However, that he would take the time to criticize a body that he believes is “continu[ally]” and “consistent[ly]” irrelevant suggests that it is anything but.

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Dec. 4, 2007

A photograph printed on page 11 of the Nov. 8, 1968 issue of <i>The Tech</i> misidentified semifinalist candidates for junior prom queen. The photograph labelled Jane Goodwin is actually of Barbara Siebert (now Barbara Siebert Titelbaum), according to Siebert. The photograph labelled with Siebert’s name is not of her. Attempts to reach Goodwin have been unsuccessful.

Forward Ryan W. Ballentine ’09 scored two goals and added three assists to help MIT ease past Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 9-3, in NorthEast Collegiate Hockey Association action on Friday night at the NorthStar Youth Forum. With the victory, the Engineers moved to 5-0-0, marking the second consecutive year in which the Cardinal and Gray has won its first five games of the season.

The MIT men’s 15th-ranked swimming and diving team won 17 of 18 swimming events en route to a first-place finish at this weekend’s MIT Invitational, held over the course of Friday and Saturday in the Zesiger Pool. The Engineers won the event with a final team score of 1,082.5, beating out Tufts University, which finished with 1,046.5.

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Dec. 4, 2007

Amy E. Jacobi ’11 continued her remarkable rookie campaign at the MIT Invitational this weekend, as she contributed to three Tech relay victories and added two individual triumphs to lead No. 19 MIT to a first-place finish. The Cardinal and Gray won the event with a final team score of 910.50, comfortably ahead of second-place finisher Tufts University, which concluded the competition with a tally of 783.

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Dec. 4, 2007

Known as “Asians,” Indians make up a significant part of the East African population. Though the minority, their culture has been strongly integrated into the East African culture. Considering themselves Asian-Africans, the Indian community in Kenya are well-respected and mostly in the higher economic class. Though I did not interact with any Asian-Africans in Kenya, the integration of the two cultures was obvious. However, I should say, the differences were pronounced and some environmental factors were almost the opposite of what they were in India.

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Dec. 4, 2007

Many people at MIT are nerdier than most, and some have and continue to spend hours at a time playing video games instead of talking to anything with a pulse. So, it’s self-explanatory that social skills, at least among us freshmen, may be a smidgen underdeveloped. As impressive as our LANs are, we are not, by and large, a party school. By that, I mean that when people hear “MIT,” they generally don’t think of us as the “Planet of the Witty, Friendly, and Appropriately Hygienic Students” so much as they do the “Planet of the Slide-Ruling Apes.” Tragic, no?

I was browsing through <i>The New York Times</i> at lunch last week when I ran into this article: “Effort to Limit Junk Food in Schools Faces Hurdles.” Apparently with kids getting fatter, our government felt forced to ask the question, “Are our children eating too much junk food?” And with the answer being a resounding “Yes,” they’re thinking of banning junk food from schools.